


we once swore we could defeat this

by starlight_sugar



Category: Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Genre: 5 Times, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 16:44:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15800559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlight_sugar/pseuds/starlight_sugar
Summary: Five conversations about what it means to be married to Ethan Hunt.





	we once swore we could defeat this

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fanwork not at all affiliated with the M:I franchise. The title comes from [Moment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSqKmLMtn64) by Nate Ruess
> 
> This fic was written for the prompt "marriage" on my Trope Bingo Round 11 card.
> 
> There are a couple of non-graphic references to violence, injuries, and kidnapping. There is a light spoiler for Fallout, although not anything plotty. Also, welcome to my version of the M:I timeline, where everything's made up and the points don't matter.
> 
> ETA 9/1/18: So upon a re-viewing of Fallout, I have realized that Julia introduces her husband as being named Eric, but his name in the credits is listed as Patrick. I'm sticking with Patrick until Chris McQuarrie explains himself, but this note is for all you detail-oriented people out there who are just as confused as I am.
> 
> ETA 11/26/18: I now have a digital copy of Fallout, and... the character is listed as Erik! With a K! Tags and content have been updated to reflect the change.

1.

Julia manages not to say anything the first three times it happens. Ethan told her everything, after Shanghai, and that bought him some goodwill. More than he’s ever going to know, really. Oh, she handled the secret agent thing as gracefully as she could, as gracefully as anyone could, but it’s still impossible to wrap her head around the depth of it all. Especially when she has nobody to talk to about it.

And Ethan swore he would be honest with her from there on out, explained that he was still training agents with his agency but would leave, if she wanted to. She hasn’t decided if she wants to yet, two months down the line, but she thinks they should wait until after the public wedding. She still hasn’t told her parents about the elopement; they might be more upset about that than they would about her husband being a secret operative.

She’d trusted him to be honest, up until the time he came home concussed. He’d staggered in and said “one of the trainees got the jump,” and she’d sighed and sat with him and didn’t let him fall asleep all night long. The second time it’d been two broken fingers, the last two on his left hand, that a trainee had snapped while sparring. The third time she wasn’t sure what it was, other than mottled bruises on his ribs that looked far too fresh for whatever excuse he’d come up with. And she didn’t say anything, because she needed something to be normal. She’d already become the nurse who was kidnapped at work and the one who got shotgun married in the basement, she didn’t need to be the one who controlled her husband’s life.

And then:

“Are you stitching up your arm in our kitchen,” Julia says, with much, much more calm than she expected. She sounds to her own ears like she’s caught between horror and rage, and for a second she entertains the idea of shouting about it being unsanitary, like that’s the biggest problem at hand here. It’d probably be easier than finding the words for what she’s actually feeling.

Ethan, who looks like a deer caught in headlights, pauses with the needle inside his arm. “Is there a right answer to this question?”

Julia takes a deep, calming breath through her nose, and then exhales through her mouth, and then drops her work bag on the ground. “Let me.”

“Jules-”

“Ethan,” she says sharply, and he must understand that she’s not giving this one up without a fight. He pulls the needle back and she goes to him and takes it. “I’m assuming you got some kind of field training.”

“Yes,” he breathes. She can feel him staring at her and doesn’t bother telling him to stop, even though something about it is overwhelming.

She looks carefully at the stitches he’s already made. They’re tight, if a little haphazard. Not bad. “Did you clean the wound?”

“Ye-”

“And not with a bottle of vodka.”

Ethan sighs through his nose. “That’s only in the movies.” He says it like it’s halfway a joke, like he’s not sure if she’s going to laugh at the punchline. Maybe he can tell that she’s not particularly in the mood to laugh.

“That’s not a yes,” she answers tightly, and Ethan uses his free hand to gesture at something behind him. It looks like an open bottle of water, and a paper towel. “They teach you to do stitches but not to clean and dress a wound?”

“I didn’t have time.”

He’s still watching her. She tries to keep her face under control, just barely manages it. “But you had time to come back here.”

“I was-”

“Don’t say you were training agents.” She doesn’t look up, just starts stitching the wound. Tiny, neat, just like work. Just another patient. “This isn’t the kind of thing you get when you’re training.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because when you were actually training agents a few months ago, you never came home like this.”

Ethan breathes out carefully. “I’m not leaving the country.”

“Oh, you’re not leaving the country,” Julia mutters. Maybe it’s cruel to echo him, but it gets him to stop talking until she finishes stitching up the cut. She cuts the thread and steels herself and looks at him. Ethan’s giving her this look like he’s not quite chastised but he’s ready to be. Like he’s ready for her to yell at him. “We said no more secrets.”

“We did.”

“Are you still training agents?”

“I’m supervising agents on minor local missions.”

“So you’re in the field.”

“Yes and no. I’m their support if they need it, I’m safe the whole time.”

“Ethan,” Julia says, and her voice cracks, which would be absolutely horrifying if Ethan’s composure didn’t crack along with it. All the guilt seems to catch up with him at once, and he lifts his hands to her shoulders, settles for gripping her forearms. “Ethan, you told me you’d be honest.”

“I wasn’t expecting it to make any difference,” he admits, and lowers his forehead against hers. “I didn’t know I’d be getting hurt.”

“But you still changed things.”

“I know.” One hand wanders up to cup her face, cradling her jaw; it’d be sweet if she couldn’t feel one finger pressing against a scar behind her ear that she got somewhere in Shanghai. “I’m sorry.”

“Just tell me.”

“I will.”

“And I’m a nurse, it’s my job to fix people up when they get hurt.” She brushes her fingertips across the cut, carefully stitched shut, his work and hers side by side. “Come to me next time.”

“I don’t want you involved in this,” he says, like a confession. Like some deep, guilty secret.

Julia nearly bites her lip. “I know,” she says, and doesn’t remind him that she is already involved.

 

2.

Luther is the last person she goes out with before they leave Virginia. Not her coworkers, not her siblings, but good old Luther. She likes him, not because he’s kind to her but because the first thing he did was say he was worried about her being involved.

(“I can keep myself safe,” she said, still bruised from Shanghai, and he’d lifted an eyebrow, and she’d tilted her chin up at him, like if she looked up long enough he’d forget that she was new at this.

“I’m more worried you’re gonna try and keep Ethan safe,” he’d answered, and that was the most honest anyone had been with her, and she still appreciates that, even now.)

“I’ve never traveled much,” she admits, swirling her spoon in a bowl of soup. She’s not particularly hungry, but Luther had offered to treat her to lunch, and she’d almost jumped at the chance to say goodbye. “Does Ethan speak Swiss German?”

Luther snorts. “Ethan speaks a lot of languages,” he says, which is the kind of thing Julia should know about her husband. “Do you?”

“I’ve been trying to learn the basics, but the hospital I’ll be at has a lot of English-speaking staff.”

“Zurich is a beautiful city.”

Julia shakes her head. “D.C. is a beautiful city,” she answers, quieter than she’d like to.

There are reasons for them to move to Switzerland. Ethan is retired, but it’s dangerous for him to stay stagnant for too long, and by extension it’s dangerous for Julia. She’s taken self defense classes and gotten better at dodging people who might want to abduct her, at snapping photos of them and sending them off to Ethan and Benji just in case something goes wrong. It still happens, maybe half a dozen times in the past year. Someone stuffed her in a car trunk once and she got out within a few minutes of waking up. Luther had told her she did a good job, afterwards; Ethan had only clung to her like he thought she was going to turn into smoke in his arms.

So they found the jobs, far enough away that they could be safe, and far enough away that they wouldn’t have to keep their heads down constantly. Ethan is doing some kind of security consulting for a Swiss bank, Julia is working at a major hospital, and she’s been learning basic French and German in her spare time. She’s going to have to teach Ethan to teach her Swiss German, now that she knows he can.

“You don’t have to leave,” Luther says quietly. The rest of it goes unspoken: it’s safer if they do, it’s better if Ethan doesn’t have to worry about her as much and vice versa, they’ve already committed to the move. But they don’t have to go.

Julia sets her spoon down. “I’ve lived here most of my life. It’s time for me to do something different.”

Luther waits her out, like he knows there’s something she’s not saying. He’s patient like that. Julia hates it, sometimes, the way that being around secret agents suddenly means she can’t keep secrets anymore.

“And this is what it’s going to take to make this work.” She suddenly can’t meet his eyes anymore, so she drops her gaze to his hands, folded on the table between them. “Going to Zurich, the opportunity of a lifetime that I didn’t even know I wanted, it’s all just for the sake of this marriage.”

“And you’re willing to make the move to save the marriage?”

“Yes,” Julia answers, without hesitation. If this is what it means to be married to Ethan then she’ll make it work. She’s sure of it.

Luther reaches out and takes one of her hands, thumb stroking against the back of her hand. She squeezes his palm and looks up at him, and he smiles at her, gentle as she’s ever seen him. “Then it’s the right choice. Zurich will be lucky to have you.”

“I’m going to miss you a lot,” she answers, because it’s the only thing she can think.

“That’s why they have cell phones,” Luther answers, a laugh rumbling low in his chest, but he doesn’t let go of her hand.

 

3.

Ethan says, “I think we should leave.”

They made it almost two years in Zurich. Ethan took to it like a fish takes to water, which Julia was painfully, pettily envious of until she remembered that it was his job for well over a decade to look like he belonged anywhere. And besides, the envy only lasted for the first month or so, up until Ethan admitted that he could never quite remember how to get to the grocery store without his GPS.

She was the one who put down roots, the one who went out for coffee with their neighbors and decorated their apartment. She learned to cook local food. She joined a bridge club at the hospital, not because she cared about bridge but because it seemed like an awful lot of her coworkers did. She learned Swiss German from Ethan and her coworkers, and within a year she wasn’t quite fluent but she wasn’t fumbling anymore. She saved lives at the hospital, made friends, called Luther once a week and her mother twice a month. She made it work. No, not that; she made it  _ hers. _

Ethan seemed happy enough, although she could always tell that the new job wasn’t enough for him, not the way the IMF was. She saw the way he twitched whenever news broke. An explosion, uncannily close to the Taj Mahal; an outbreak of a new flu strain in Argentina; a terrorist attack in Geneva, far too close to home, that left him strained and tense for weeks.

Julia was held hostage three times in Zurich. People kidnapped her twice because of Ethan, just random revenge plots that ended within a day. And there was an attack on her hospital, where she and a handful of the other doctors were held hostage. She can’t say if it was because of her or if it was just because of the hospital. She supposes it doesn’t matter either way.

She was the only one who keeps her cool completely, maybe because she knew Ethan was calling in every IMF favor that he was owed, maybe because it had already happened to her a dozen times over. All she knows is that she got through it and got home and Ethan clung to her like always, and now he’s talking about leaving.

Julia wants to say:  _ this is my home, this is my life, this is not your fault. _ Julia wants to say:  _ you thought we should leave Virginia and it didn’t stop there, so why shouldn’t we stay? _ Julia wants to say:  _ you gave up being an agent for me, and I know that was the other love of your life, and it’s selfish of me not to want to do the same for you, but I don’t, Ethan, I want to stay. _

Julia says: “Okay.”

 

4.

She doesn’t bother putting down roots again, not the same way she did in Zurich. They last four months in Taipei before Julia is taken off the street. They manage another two months in Belize before one day Ethan doesn’t come home from work and Julia has to call Luther in a panic to find him. They make it nine months in Morocco before Ethan insists they move and won’t even tell her why, so they go to Croatia, and barely make it three months before Julia is kidnapped. Ethan gets her back quietly, without any fuss, and takes her to a safehouse.

Ethan is talking about something. She doesn’t know what. She hasn’t taken her eyes off his face since he sat her down on the couch and bandaged up the single cut on her arm; he’s gotten faster about getting her back, and she’s gotten better at talking in order to avoid actual danger. He’s gripping her hand and he says something about - god, who knows, about where they’re going next or how she can stop this from happening again. Like either of them can stop it.

“This is going to keep happening,” she says, and Ethan stops, blinks at her. “Right?”

He takes a deep breath and cups her face with one hand, and she leans into it, like if she presses enough of herself into him somehow that’ll make it less true. “Yes,” he answers, his breath gentle on her face. “It will.”

“And we’ll have to keep moving.”

“To stay safe.”

“To stay hidden,” she says, sharper than she intends, and Ethan closes his eyes. “To be on the run, constantly, to keep - I don’t even know, to keep quiet until someone figures out who we are?”

His thumb sweeps under her eye. “I don’t know what else to do,” he admits, and his voice cracks, and she realizes that his thumb wiped away a tear. Another one trickles down her cheek, and he wipes it away, still without looking at her. “As long as you’re with me, you’re a target.”

It’s a conversation they’ve had before. She’d always said, every other time, that it was a sacrifice she was willing to make. That maybe she’d be a target without him. That at least this way they were together. But Julia misses Zurich, with a hollow ache she feels whenever she thinks about the way the sunlight hit their apartment. She misses Virginia. She misses Morocco, and her mother, and she selfishly, selfishly misses the days when she thought Ethan analyzed traffic patterns for VDOT.

“I can’t keep doing this,” she says, and she wants to be angry. She wants to be sad. But suddenly the truth of it is all she knows, the certainty thrumming through her veins. She can’t keep doing this. She can’t keep living like this.

Ethan meets her eyes, not quite crying, but she can see the tears gathered. “I know,” he says, and she wonders how long he has seen this conversation coming. “Jules, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She shakes her head, and she knows she’s crying now and she can’t stop it, even with Ethan’s palm pressed again her cheek. “I love you,” she says, “baby, I love you more than anything, but I can’t do this.”

“C’mere,” Ethan says, and next thing she knows he’s gathering her into his arms. “You don’t have to, Jules, you never had to. You never had to.”

And Julia presses her face into his neck and lets herself cry, because maybe she never had to, but now for the first time she doesn’t want to.

 

5.

This is how Julia gets engaged the second time:

Erik is about to start a twelve hour shift. Julia has just finished one. He brought her coffee without her asking, and a chocolate bar because he felt like it. She takes the coffee and the chocolate and says, quietly, “Marry me.”

“You’ve always been a romantic,” Erik says, and it’s as good as a yes.

She wishes, sometimes, that he wouldn’t say things like “always been.” She loves him, knows it with the certainty that she knows that she has made the right choices after leaving Ethan. She laid low in Europe for a while before getting back stateside: Seattle, Boston, New York, and now Houston. She met Erik at a conference in California and knew, right away, from the first date, that they had something.

(She’d sent Luther his name and picture that night, just to make sure he wasn’t an agent or a threat. She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until he’d sent back the all-clear.)

Erik knows that she was married, because she felt like she owed that honesty to him. She called it irreconcilable differences, and then spent some time making sure that the divorce paperwork had gone through. The IMF had taken care of that, at some point, and so it was of course impeccable. It was a clean break. She never had to worry about it.

She writes Ethan letters, and she’s gotten good at figuring out codes. A well-placed classified ad in a newspaper here, a letter sent to an unmarked PO box there. Dear Ethan, I’m still alive. Dear Ethan, Italy is beautiful in the summer. Dear Ethan, rosti doesn’t taste the same when I’m not in Zurich or not with you, but we left that behind years ago, didn’t we?

“Do you want a destination wedding?” Erik asks, while they’re hiking a trail in Idaho together on a much-needed vacation. “I mean, we could probably afford it, but that seems like the kind of thing we should discuss early on.”

Julia laughs. “You think two months before the wedding, I’m going to say, ‘Oh, by the way-’”

Erik clears his throat and tosses his hair back, the way he always does before he starts impersonating her like she’s a cartoon. “Ricky, darling,” he coos, “I just think it would be  _ charming- _ ”

“Oh, charming,” Julia says, and Erik's smile stretches a little wider.

“Charming to get married in Barthelooooona.”

“Barcelona,” she corrects him absently, and he laughs, stumbles on a rock and lets her catch his arm. She doesn’t let go of his elbow. “No, I think we can save the travel for the honeymoon. I’m not one for big weddings.”

Erik tilts his head and looks at her. She can feel the question coming just before she asks it, and she only barely manages to turn and look at him before he says, “What was it like last time?”

Julia has never mentioned Ethan by name. Never even mentioned what he used to do, cover story or otherwise. She loves Ethan, she loves the ten seconds a year that she gets to glimpse him across a crowded room, but that’s no way to live. Not even for the sake of someone she loves.

Erik is still looking at her hesitantly, so she takes a deep breath. “There are two answers to that.”

“Two?” Erik gasps and clutches at his chest dramatically with one hand. “How many more secrets are you keeping?”

Julia drops her hand from his elbow to thread her fingers through his, bumping elbows with him. “More than you can count, mister.”

Erik chuckles. “Okay, tell me about your two weddings.”

“Well, the big one that my mom still has pictures of-” that’s a problem for Ethan’s anonymity, now that she thinks of it, and she’d better hope that he never thinks to ask about it- “wasn’t actually that big. We had the ceremony at a church and the reception in our backyard. Mostly friends and family.”

“Not a big wedding.”

“Not at all.”

“What was the second one?”

“We were about halfway between the proposal and the planned wedding date.” She pauses, flipping back in her mental calendar, and looks down at her feet, swinging their joined hands back and forth. “Less than halfway, actually. And he had a business trip come up, so he visited me at work and said we should get married, then and there. So we found a priest and had a ceremony in the basement, then and there.”

“Wow,” Erik says quietly. She looks up at him, and he’s giving her an inscrutable look, like he’s picking her apart. Like he’s trying to understand. “You loved him a lot.”

“I did,” Julia says. It doesn’t hurt, the way it used to.

“Do you still?”

“I always will, I think.”

“Should I worry?” he says, like it’s a joke when she’s sure it’s not.

“No,” Julia answers, and Erik looks away. “We separated for… good reasons. I don’t bear him any ill will or anything like that. We just couldn’t make it work anymore.”

“Couldn’t make it work anymore,” Erik repeats. “Do you see him?”

“Almost never. He moves around a lot for work.”

Erik nods, absorbing that, and they walk in silence for another couple minutes. Julia lets her mind wander to the save-the-date cards they have picked out, to the one with Ethan’s name on it. Maybe she should send it to Luther instead. It seems a little cruel to send it to Ethan, even if they’ve supposedly moved on by now, but she wouldn’t mind actually having Luther there. Lord knows he’d given her enough tips about going to ground, especially for those first few months she was on her own. The least she could do is show him she’s doing okay.

“You know,” Erik says at last, and she glances up at him, “we could also get married in a hospital basement.”

Julia laughs. “I think once was enough for me.”

“Hospital rooftop,” Erik says without missing a beat, and she can’t help the way she laughs again. It’s her favorite thing about him. He makes her feel like she just can’t help herself. “Love you.”

“Love you too,” Julia says, and thankfully, blessedly, she knows she means it.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on Tumblr and Twitter @waveridden, or on Dreamwidth @harshlights.


End file.
